The next morning we packed up camp and headed out to Kings Canyon for our 3 hour walk. It was a hard walk! At least the first part was anyway; the hill we had to climb to reach the top was very very steep! Kings Canyon (270m high) was beautiful with views of the vast nothingness out there. We saw the Lost City and the Garden of Eden. We finished the walk late morning and headed off to cook up our last lunch before we started the long drive to Alice Springs, where we arrived that evening. This trip was great; [View Full Entry]

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So the next morning we were supposed to go the sunrise viewing of Uluru but the clouds were so low there was no point. Doc said he had never seen cloud on Uluru, so we were seeing something a bit different! We went to the base of Uluru to do the base walk all the way round. We started at 6.45am and completed the 9km walk. It doesn't look that big but it is! You can see how low the cloud was from my photo's - most of the rock was covered! But it had mostly lifted by the time we [View Full Entry]

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The next day we were up at 5am for the long drive to Coober Pedy where we arrived at 2pm. Coober Pedy is roughly half way to Uluru. On the way we stopped at a salt lake that Doc (the tour guide) said is normally dry but today it had water. You could see the salt that had dried on the floor around the outside of the lake. Getting to Coober Pedy we had a little tour of the town where we went into the underground church. A lot of the population of 3000 lives underground because in the summer the [View Full Entry]

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Got picked up at the very early time of 6.10am and left Adelaide for the start of our 6-day Adventure Tours tour Adelaide to Alice Springs. We drove a LOT on this trip, some days covering 700km, with nothing inbetween. After a lot of driving and a few stops we arrived at the small town of Quorn which was to be our base for 2 nights. We were staying in an old mill. That afternoon we did a 3 hour, 9km hike to the top of a mountain called Dutchman's Stern. That was a hard walk, but the views were absolutely [View Full Entry]

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So we got to Adelaide late that afternoon. I was staying in Backpack Oz as Sarah and Chris who I did OzIntro with in December work there. That evening I met the others from the tour at a cute pub called Grace Emily where we played pool, listened to the band and drunk varying amounts of wine and tequilla. It was a good night, though it did have a bit of a dodgy end. The next day I had a tour booked of Barossa wine valley with Tanja, Philip and James from the tour. Waking up with a hangover, a wine [View Full Entry]

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The second day of the tour we saw a few more stacks before heading for the Grampians. The Grampians is a national park, named after the Grampians in Scotland. We went to the Grampians culture centre, where we learnt about the Aboriginal heritage here. The scenery here was stunning, amazing views! We spent the night at Halls Gap where there were lots of kangeroos everywhere. In the morning there were loads on the grass outside our cabins! That morning we did a big hike/scramble at the other end of the park to the top, it was very windy and again great [View Full Entry]

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First some information that may come in handy one day. Picking locks using a hairgrip does work! I spent a couple of days in Melbourne after Tasmania and one day I locked my locker key inside my locker. After a bit of effort with the hairgrip it opened; I didn't think it would actually work!! So Friday 22nd May saw me depart Melbourne for my Great Ocean Road and Grampians tour. Departing very early (not as early as some of my later starts!) we left Melbourne where it got gradually thicker in fog, you could hardly see the car in front! [View Full Entry]

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I had decided a few days into my Tasmania trip that it would be great to hire a car for a couple of days. So I did that the day after Cradle Mountain. I chose a little Hyundi Getz from a place near the airport and off I went for two days. Some of my driving lessons were done in this car so I was familar with it. I had booked a bed at a town called bernie on the north west coast for that night so that was my destination. I wanted to be there before it got dark, so [View Full Entry]

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So I was back in Launceston and I still hadn't been to Cradle Mountain. So I booked a tour. I got picked up and it was just the tour guide and I! Still, it was a very comfortable drive in a Galaxy, nice change from mini-buses! It was about 3 hours away, we stopped once at Sheffield - the town of the murals, we murals everywhere! Every year they have a mural painting competition. Apparently there are a lot of 'town of . . ' in Tasmania. The tour guide showed me a town that was trying to become the town [View Full Entry]

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I wanted to see the east coast so I booked a two day tour with Under Down Under from Hobart to Launceston. It picked me up 7.30am the day after Port Arthur. I thought that was an early start; I was to get much earlier ones in the outback on the mainland! Jason was our tour guide and we had 15 passengers all together, which I have just now realised is a lot of people compared to my other tours I have done more recently! We had people from England, Taiwan, Switzerland, Japan, Czech Republic, Indonesia, Germany and Holland. One of [View Full Entry]

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